What It Was Like to Attend the First-Ever PATA Youth Workshop for Student Chapter Leaders
By Hina Takewa, PATA Wakayama University Student Chapter Member
The PATA Youth workshop, ‘How to Successfully Market Your PATA Student Chapter,’ was held online on January 27, and over 30 participants from PATA Student Chapters all over the world gathered despite the time difference. The speaker was Carma Chan, PATA’s Social Media Manager, who had once been a Student Chapter Leader. Participants were required to submit their homework of creating a social media post or writing an event description prior to the workshop.
In the first chapter about Student Chapter marketing, we learned about the importance of creating effective messages for our audiences. This is because each Student Chapter has a different target audience, which means we shouldn’t try to market to everyone. Understanding how the audience consumes information is important because it is different depending on their personal situation, such as their location of residence or their age.
Have you heard of the term, ‘call to action’? It means that as digital marketers, we should define what we want to make the audience do after they see our messages. For example, we can include pop-up buttons like ‘CALL NOW’ or add QR codes that connect to our websites.
Moreover, we can’t forget about visuals. When we make posters and web advertisements, simple and clean images are needed, so we should consider the colour, text size, and length of the information. We must try to view it from the audience’s perspective and how they would react when they see the visuals.
Before I joined this workshop, I thought that sharing as much information as possible in posters and SNS posts would be ideal. With the tips and tricks I got from this workshop, I’m excited to use these new tips for my Student Chapter's Instagram posts.
After this, we did some exercises, such as making messages more clear and concise, as well as how we can create effective CTAs in various situations. It was great hearing many participants actively expressing their idea through the chatbox.
The second chapter was about social media marketing. Here, we learned about some of the characteristics of each social media platform and how to utilize them effectively. For instance, Facebook is a platform where we can easily put links and do general sharing, while Instagram can be more effective for the younger generations but our links can only be shared in the bio.
Carma mentioned that social media is very easy to use for making connections with our audience. However, it is very difficult to do it well and needs constant updating if we want to make our own image better.
The most interesting learning point in this section was that using blank spaces wisely can be a tool to grab users’ attention. When you use social media, you can tap ‘See more…’ to read the full sentences of each post. Sometimes, there is a big blank between sentences and the ‘See more…’ We can put more information in this blank to maximize the space in our captions for attention.
In short, the key points of this workshop are:
Keep the text concise
Put most engaging information on top
Make important information easy to find
Use formatting, color, emojis, and photos to make messages stronger
Lastly, we discussed how to improve our homework submissions by using what we learned through the workshop. Carma showed some examples and we discussed how we can make improvements to them in the chatbox. During this chapter, we also learned many things such as using # (hashtags) and how to make pictures fit perfectly on each platform.
After the workshop ended, we took a group photo and promised to meet each other face-to-face next time.
We all struggle with the pandemic in various parts of the world, thus we are not able to move freely. This gives us the motivation to look for something we can do now. In that sense, this workshop was a great opportunity for me as I had the chance to meet friends from around the world. I will definitely share this experience with the PATA Wakayama University Student Chapter members after this workshop.
The video recording and presentation slides for this PATA Youth workshop can be accessed here.